Sunday, February 5, 2012

Many folk speak disparagingly of horse opera, which surely bears little relation to the historical exploration of the American West, but is entertaining on a superficial level. Similarly they sneer at space opera, which is horse opera translated to space. Bat Durston jumps into his spaceship and warps to Planet X where humanoid monsters are terrorizing the colonists. He whips out his blaster and goes after the monsters. Bang bang, you're dead. The colonists are grateful.

Okay, I have trouble doing anything conventionally, so when I set out to do space opera, I started from the plight of the Vietnamese and Haitian Boat People in the 20th century, so that was my historical basis, and went from there. The refugees in the space bubble encounter the same sort of pirates and most are brutally slaughtered. But a few survive, one of whom is Hope Hubris, who goes on to become a naturalized Jupiter (America) citizen and finally comes to rule Jupiter. He is the Space Tyrant, in the sense of one-man rule, not evil. It's a pretty wild and gritty and often sexy adventure. Critics never liked it, being too dull to understand what I was doing, but readers, being smarter, loved it. Why don't you sample it and see what you think?

The complete Bio of a Space Tyrant series is on sale at Amazon for Kindles this weekend through Monday from my new publisher Premier Digital Publishing. The first book is FREE and volumes 2-6 are only $.99. Can't beat that.